4 ms·

PHP Sucks: So What?

30 points by DigitalSea 15y ago

VMG 15y ago
PHP is cheap to host, cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers and quick to code in if you know what you’re doing and at the end of the day what does your client truly care about; If that statement is correct (I don't know), it is an argument to not do PHP professionally if you are concerned about income. Better target a market with a lower suppy.
- Xylakant 15y ago
  From my experience neither is true. > PHP is cheap to host This used to be true in some respects. Free webhosts often offered PHP as the only scripting language but the offers were often severely limited in which extensions were available and in other respects. Deploying a moderately complex application often was work for a day [1] - which translates to at least two years of paid hosting on a decent hoster. Ruby on the contrary used to require specialized hosting or a dedicated server. With the rise of heroku, this point became moot. > cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers The lesson I took from being technical lead for a 50+ dev team is that it's easy to find cheap php developers, but they often turn out to be Net Negative Programmers. Decent PHP programmers take decent salaries (just as decent ruby/python/java programmers) and - as every decent programmer - are quite well capable of picking up other languages in a short amount of time. If you're just doing "standard websites" cheap developers might be just what you need though (you could go for cheap rails developers as well, they exist). > quick to code in if you know what you’re doing There were times when I considered myself a skilled php programmer, but compared to what I can churn out in ruby, php flat out looses. There are too many beartraps and tarpits that you can step in, borked php configurations or stupid bugs ruining your whole day [2]. [1] figuring out how the borked configuration influenced the application, finding workarounds, ... [2] I recall this one costing me hours and hours of head-scratching https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 (I love the "This is intended behavior" comment)
jerf 15y ago
"It doesn't matter if X sucks" is a rephrasing of "It doesn't matter if Y is excellent." If it doesn't matter if a language sucks or is excellent, than what exactly does the word sucks in "PHP sucks" refer to? It's a logical sleight of hand, but logic doesn't tolerate that. You may be willing to pay the downside cost, but that doesn't mean the downside cost doesn't matter or doesn't exist. There's no way around the fact that language quality matters. And I for one don't have too much trouble finding non-PHP web work. I doubt I'm alone.
- muyuu 15y ago
  sleight of hand
  - jerf 15y ago
    Aye.
twiceaday 15y ago
So give me karma.
Argorak 15y ago
I don't like "my tool sucks, but clients care about the result". If architects thought that, we'd still be living in huts. Improving your tool improves the result. Clients are also not the only benchmark: mostly, they just want a faster horse. Either PHP doesn't suck because it does the job better then others in certain areas (which I'd happily admit). Or it sucks and should be replaced. Everything else is a programmers Stockholm Syndrome.
10098 15y ago
> While you all bitch and moan about how bad PHP... I’ll be making easy money and stealing your clients. Someone tell this guy to stop embarrassing himself, seriously.
lucian1900 15y ago
So, use something less shit. Python and Ruby are exactly as easy to host and arguably easier to find skilled programmers for.
ing33k 15y ago
PHP Sucks: So What? We all should try to improve it.
- Intermediate 15y ago
  or just abandon it
- DigitalSea 15y ago
  Nah man, are you crazy? If we improve PHP, who will we have left to pick on? It's like taking the fat nerdy kid that gets picked on in school, putting him on a diet, giving him a gym membership and some acne cream. PHP is the fat nerdy kid of the web.
10098 15y ago
The first code that I was actually paid for was written in PHP. I was a hungry student trying to earn some money and gather some experience. We were a small studio making websites. There were enough customers, and my income depended directly on how many "projects" I could do in a short timeframe, so naturally, I wanted to do more, faster. Of course, PHP was the easiest way to achieve that goal. I would take a CMS, slap the design onto it, write some php and javascript code to make it behave as expected, and voila. The client was happy, my boss was happy and I got paid, but I was not happy at all, because the whole thing was soul-crushingly boring, stupid and I had already learned enough of a decent programming language to understand the shortcomings of php and be irritated by them. When I got an (unpaid) internship at a real company offering work on more interesting (non-web) projects, I left that php sweatshop as fast as I could, without ever looking back. Point is, if you want to spend the rest of your career slapping around icky php code (like my 17-year-old self), then by all means, learn nothing, talk about how it's the result that matters and do your best to keep your horizons as narrow as possible. good day.
arb99 15y ago
This has always been my argument. A hell of a lot of very popular sites (eg tube sites and of course all the many very popular WP blogs) are written in php. It gets the job done just as easily as other languages. Just not as elegant. I run my own network of sites, and almost all webmasters I also work with all know the ins and outs of php. Its just quicker and more efficient to code in php. But on here and a few other sites php gets a lot of flak. If i'm ever asked how to get started in programming I'd always recommend php (or maybe JS) because it is very simple and there are so many resources for it.
codesuela 15y ago
He's talking about building cookie cutter websites where the customer has a 10 USD hosting budget. For that PHP (including all the PHP CMS) is unbeatable however if this not the domain you want to be in there is no reason for you to be worried about getting your clients stolen by this guy
xnarf 15y ago
i see a lot of show-stoppers for PHP http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/74/PHP.html http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/74/PHP.html
- DigitalSea 15y ago
  For the year of 2011 there were only 37 vulnerabilities in PHP, so far in 2012 there have only been 7 (according to that site). Doesn't the link you posted suggest that PHP is getting better? It seems PHP has had a lot less vulnerabilities than I thought it did considering it's a proven fact the more people using something the more bugs and vulnerabilities will be discovered (Windows is a perfect example, bugs galore).
soc88 15y ago
I can't stand this apologetic bullshit anymore. If you think defending PHP makes you look witty: KILL YOURSELF. Thanks.
ericclemmons 15y ago
This article chooses PROs for PHP that are hardly and issue, especially when developing a non-trivial app. Hosting, for example, is a breeze with PHP because of the wide support on budget hosts. However, devs typically follow 5-year old workflows and FTP their changes to the site. Heroku and the like did not exist for PHP for some time and perfected the ease of deployment and hosting better than budget hosts could. I still develop primarily in PHP and JS everyday, and the majority of my code is all about the architecture of the app and domain models. PHP's quirks are never an issue when the bulk of your work is with abstracted objects. PHP can be elegant with frameworks like Symfony2 and Doctrin, which in my opinion, hold developed and their pull-requests to extremely high standards for th PHP community. The coder and the architecture have much more to do with the elegance or "suckiness" of a language.

30 points by DigitalSea 15y ago

VMG 15y ago

PHP is cheap to host, cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers and quick to code in if you know what you’re doing and at the end of the day what does your client truly care about; If that statement is correct (I don't know), it is an argument to not do PHP professionally if you are concerned about income. Better target a market with a lower suppy.

Xylakant 15y ago
From my experience neither is true. > PHP is cheap to host This used to be true in some respects. Free webhosts often offered PHP as the only scripting language but the offers were often severely limited in which extensions were available and in other respects. Deploying a moderately complex application often was work for a day [1] - which translates to at least two years of paid hosting on a decent hoster. Ruby on the contrary used to require specialized hosting or a dedicated server. With the rise of heroku, this point became moot. > cheap to find decently priced & skilled programmers The lesson I took from being technical lead for a 50+ dev team is that it's easy to find cheap php developers, but they often turn out to be Net Negative Programmers. Decent PHP programmers take decent salaries (just as decent ruby/python/java programmers) and - as every decent programmer - are quite well capable of picking up other languages in a short amount of time. If you're just doing "standard websites" cheap developers might be just what you need though (you could go for cheap rails developers as well, they exist). > quick to code in if you know what you’re doing There were times when I considered myself a skilled php programmer, but compared to what I can churn out in ruby, php flat out looses. There are too many beartraps and tarpits that you can step in, borked php configurations or stupid bugs ruining your whole day [2]. [1] figuring out how the borked configuration influenced the application, finding workarounds, ... [2] I recall this one costing me hours and hours of head-scratching https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40691 (I love the "This is intended behavior" comment)

jerf 15y ago

"It doesn't matter if X sucks" is a rephrasing of "It doesn't matter if Y is excellent." If it doesn't matter if a language sucks or is excellent, than what exactly does the word sucks in "PHP sucks" refer to? It's a logical sleight of hand, but logic doesn't tolerate that. You may be willing to pay the downside cost, but that doesn't mean the downside cost doesn't matter or doesn't exist. There's no way around the fact that language quality matters. And I for one don't have too much trouble finding non-PHP web work. I doubt I'm alone.

muyuu 15y ago
sleight of hand
- jerf 15y ago
  Aye.

twiceaday 15y ago

So give me karma.

Argorak 15y ago

I don't like "my tool sucks, but clients care about the result". If architects thought that, we'd still be living in huts. Improving your tool improves the result. Clients are also not the only benchmark: mostly, they just want a faster horse. Either PHP doesn't suck because it does the job better then others in certain areas (which I'd happily admit). Or it sucks and should be replaced. Everything else is a programmers Stockholm Syndrome.

10098 15y ago

> While you all bitch and moan about how bad PHP... I’ll be making easy money and stealing your clients. Someone tell this guy to stop embarrassing himself, seriously.

lucian1900 15y ago

So, use something less shit. Python and Ruby are exactly as easy to host and arguably easier to find skilled programmers for.

ing33k 15y ago

PHP Sucks: So What? We all should try to improve it.

Intermediate 15y ago
or just abandon it
DigitalSea 15y ago
Nah man, are you crazy? If we improve PHP, who will we have left to pick on? It's like taking the fat nerdy kid that gets picked on in school, putting him on a diet, giving him a gym membership and some acne cream. PHP is the fat nerdy kid of the web.

10098 15y ago

The first code that I was actually paid for was written in PHP. I was a hungry student trying to earn some money and gather some experience. We were a small studio making websites. There were enough customers, and my income depended directly on how many "projects" I could do in a short timeframe, so naturally, I wanted to do more, faster. Of course, PHP was the easiest way to achieve that goal. I would take a CMS, slap the design onto it, write some php and javascript code to make it behave as expected, and voila. The client was happy, my boss was happy and I got paid, but I was not happy at all, because the whole thing was soul-crushingly boring, stupid and I had already learned enough of a decent programming language to understand the shortcomings of php and be irritated by them. When I got an (unpaid) internship at a real company offering work on more interesting (non-web) projects, I left that php sweatshop as fast as I could, without ever looking back. Point is, if you want to spend the rest of your career slapping around icky php code (like my 17-year-old self), then by all means, learn nothing, talk about how it's the result that matters and do your best to keep your horizons as narrow as possible. good day.

arb99 15y ago

This has always been my argument. A hell of a lot of very popular sites (eg tube sites and of course all the many very popular WP blogs) are written in php. It gets the job done just as easily as other languages. Just not as elegant. I run my own network of sites, and almost all webmasters I also work with all know the ins and outs of php. Its just quicker and more efficient to code in php. But on here and a few other sites php gets a lot of flak. If i'm ever asked how to get started in programming I'd always recommend php (or maybe JS) because it is very simple and there are so many resources for it.

codesuela 15y ago

He's talking about building cookie cutter websites where the customer has a 10 USD hosting budget. For that PHP (including all the PHP CMS) is unbeatable however if this not the domain you want to be in there is no reason for you to be worried about getting your clients stolen by this guy

xnarf 15y ago

i see a lot of show-stoppers for PHP http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/74/PHP.html http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/74/PHP.html

DigitalSea 15y ago
For the year of 2011 there were only 37 vulnerabilities in PHP, so far in 2012 there have only been 7 (according to that site). Doesn't the link you posted suggest that PHP is getting better? It seems PHP has had a lot less vulnerabilities than I thought it did considering it's a proven fact the more people using something the more bugs and vulnerabilities will be discovered (Windows is a perfect example, bugs galore).

soc88 15y ago

I can't stand this apologetic bullshit anymore. If you think defending PHP makes you look witty: KILL YOURSELF. Thanks.

ericclemmons 15y ago

This article chooses PROs for PHP that are hardly and issue, especially when developing a non-trivial app. Hosting, for example, is a breeze with PHP because of the wide support on budget hosts. However, devs typically follow 5-year old workflows and FTP their changes to the site. Heroku and the like did not exist for PHP for some time and perfected the ease of deployment and hosting better than budget hosts could. I still develop primarily in PHP and JS everyday, and the majority of my code is all about the architecture of the app and domain models. PHP's quirks are never an issue when the bulk of your work is with abstracted objects. PHP can be elegant with frameworks like Symfony2 and Doctrin, which in my opinion, hold developed and their pull-requests to extremely high standards for th PHP community. The coder and the architecture have much more to do with the elegance or "suckiness" of a language.